Anthony Hecht

The fruit of a lifetime's reading and thinking about literature, its delights and its responsibilities, this book by acclaimed poet and critic Anthony Hecht explores the mysteries of poetry, offering profound insight into poetic form, meter, rhyme, and meaning. Ranging from Renaissance to contemporary poets, Hecht considers the work of Shakespeare, Sidney, and Noel Housman, Hopkins, Eliot, and Auden Frost, Bishop, and Wilbur Amichai, Simic, and Heaney. Stepping back from individual poets, Hecht muses on rhyme and on meter, and also discusses St. Paul's Epistle to the Galatians and Melville's Moby-Dick. Uniting these diverse subjects is Hecht's preoccupation with the careful deployment of words, the richness and versatility of language and of those who use it well.

Prospectus includes poem and information about edition of Gehenna florilegium by Anthony Hecht with wood engravings by Leonard Baskin.

The first half of this volume, "The Presumptions of Death," accompanied by Leonard Baskin's wood engravings, is composed of two parts. In the first, Death speaks in his own person, though in differing moods and attitudes. In the second - in a variation from the medieval tradition of The Dance of Death in which he invites various members of society to dance with him, here he adopts the very identities of those - whore, society lady, scholar, film director - he means to embrace. The poet's hope has been to attain as wide a variety of tone and character as possible, from top to bottom of the social scale, from levity to pathos, contempt to sympathy. The second part of the book, "Proust on Skates," expands on the themes and tones of the first part, and includes elegies for two admired contemporary poets (James Merrill and Joseph Brodsky) and a variety of other poems that resonate with notes of frailty and mortality, though an undertone of humor is rarely far away.

In these engaging lectures, the eminent poet Anthony Hecht explores the art of poetry in its own right and in relation to the other fine arts. While the problems he treats entail both philosophic and theoretical discussion, he never allows abstract speculation to overshadow his respect for and delight in the written texts that he introduces - or in the specific examples of painting and music to which he refers. After discussing the links between literature (with special reference to poetry) and painting, and between literature and music, Hecht investigates the theme of paradise and wilderness, especially but not exclusively in The Tempest. He then turns to the question of public and private art: the ways in which all the arts participate in "equivocal and curious balances between private and public modes of discourse," between an exclusive or elitist role and the openly political. Beginning with a discussion of architecture as an illustration of a more general theme of discord and balance, the penultimate lecture probes the inner contradictions of works of art and our reactions to them. The sixth and final piece concerns art and morality, especially the issues involved in public funding of the arts.

In this study - the fruit of a lifelong critical and imaginative engagement with W H. Auden's works - Anthony Hecht identifies and traces consistent habits of thought and belief within the poet's extensive and varied writings and through his celebrated conversions and repudiations, literary and otherwise. Hecht acknowledges that Auden's poems "both invite the intrusive scrutiny of the cryptographer and deny him access." Yet the readings he offers of poems from every phase of Auden's career, along with dramatic works and critical essays, manage to explicate and illuminate Auden's rich (and often cryptic) allusiveness without murdering to dissect. Among the themes that connect Auden's works are his deep interest in the workings of language; his notion of the ultimate frivolity of art; his interest in the nature of heroism; his understanding of the relation of public to private life; the development of his religious thought; and what Auden called the "hidden law" that governs human existence - a strict and retaliatory force, something like poetic justice, that gives form to our best literature and shapes our personal fates. Hecht identifies these preoccupations in Auden's work - and shows how they cut across the many genres in which he wrote - without losing sight of each poem's individual history and context. As one of Auden's most distinguished poetic heirs, Anthony Hecht is uniquely qualified to illuminate both the reading and the writing of these essential works of twentieth-century literature.

A collection of double dactyls canonized by their creator, with an examination of the form's creation.

Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Anthony Hecht (1923-2004) was known not only for his masterful control of form and language but also for his wit and humor. With the help of Helen Hecht, the poet's widow, Jonathan F. S. Post combed through more than 4,000 letters to produce an intimate look into the poet's mind and art across a lifetime. The letters range from Hecht's early days at summer camp to college at Bard, to the front lines of World War II, to travels abroad in France and Italy, to marriage, and to fame as a poet and critic. Along the way, Hecht corresponded with well-known poets such as John Hollander, James Merrill, Anne Sexton, and Richard Wilbur. Those interested in the lives of contemporary poets will read these highly personal letters with delight and surprise.